Overview: 
Email archiving is rapidly becoming a critical best practice for organizations of all sizes and across all industries for two fundamental reasons:
- Because e-discovery and regulatory obligations require organizations to access their business records
- Because of the significant volume of email stored on servers, coupled with increasing use of email and growing attachment sizes, email storage is becoming very difficult to manage.

Osterman Research conducted a primary survey asking organizations about a variety of archiving systems. The purpose of this research was simply to understand the level of satisfaction that customers of Sunbelt Exchange Archiver (SEA) and other email archiving offerings report on a variety of metrics related to product and vendor performance. Among the offerings to which the SEA offering are compared in this white paper are Symantec Enterprise Vault, Autonomy ZANTAZ EAS, Barracuda Message Archiver, EMC EmailXtender and a wide variety of other leading -- and very capable -- email archiving solutions.

The goal of this white paper is to provide a point of comparison between SEA and other offerings in order to help decision makers in their archiving system evaluation process. Consider the following:

• 24% of companies have experienced their employees' email being subpoenaed and 15% have gone to court because of lawsuits brought on by their employees' email
• In September 2007, Morgan Stanley were required to pay $9.5 million to two sets of customers that made claims against the company, and $3 million for not providing email and supervisory content
• Email storage is growing at an average rate of 35% annually - three out of five decision makers cite the growth of messaging storage as their leading messaging-related problem

Messaging archiving can help solve all of these problems and can satisfy a wide range of legal compliance and other problems as well.

This Osterman Research white paper discusses the several reasons to implement a messaging archiving system and highlights different archiving solutions.